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absolutepowerabsolutley · 2 years

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Fan Question-and-Answer With Brad Silberling (The Director of the 2004 Lemony Snicket Movie)

1) How did you first become involved with the project after Barry Sonnenfeld had departed it? How different was his approach to yours in terms of the tone and overall plot? How much time did you have to prep your vision? I was in London in February of 2003 with Dustin Hoffman, promoting my film Moonlight Mile when I got a call from Walter Parkes at DreamWorks, asking if I was familiar with the Lemony Snicket series. I certainly was familiar with the growing phenomenon but I hadn't actually read the books. So I dashed off to Hamleys (which is a fantastic toy store in London) picked up the first 3 books and was immediately hooked and that began, for me, the two-year journey with the movie.

What everybody needs to understand is that the film Scott Rudin was producing and Barry Sonnenfeld was directing, was an exclusive production of Paramount's. I think what happened was that over the course of the budget growing and growing, which it had, Paramount decided to reach out for a studio partner and they reached out to DreamWorks. That meant that Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald (who were running DreamWorks for Steven Spielberg) would also then be coming on in a creative producing capacity. That was not acceptable to Scott Rudin and he stepped off immediately and Barry Sonnenfeld (who had not let the Men in Black 2 experience with Walter Parkes and Laurie McDonald on a great note) and so he essentially stepped off before he would have been shoved off. And was probably wise to do so. There was an existing script that I saw, as I told them with tremendous excitement that I very much wanted to do the picture. Daniel had written the adaptation and what was immediately apparent to me was that (as can happen for an author) I think he'd been so steeped in his books for so long; Daniel has a jazz improvisational skill set, he's so quick and so sharp, and I think frankly might have gotten a little bored with his original stories. So the script that I read which, was what they were going to be producing with Barry, was really madcap. It had elements of those first three stories but huge departures and lots of madcap elements. Maybe because I was a new convert, I was much more faithful in my vision to what he'd originally written and I was very stubborn about wanting to respond to these fantastic looks that I'd read. So the DreamWorks crew was in agreement and we knew we would be going off to start a new screenplay. One of the biggest elements was actually Lemony Snicket himself and in Daniel's script, Lemony was on-screen, he was a bit of an emcee and to me, the great mystery of those books was always that sense that Snicket was in shadow. Seen around the edges of the frame, never quite exposed and that was the idea of having him as the narrator only and just seeing brief glimpses of him top of the picture, in the middle of the picture, and at the end, so that was very much by design. But it's truly for the audience, I think that the two tones are each very legitimate. Barry did go on to do the Netflix series version and honestly, it is exactly what the original movie felt like and I was maybe attracted to an emotional undertone that I didn't quite feel present amidst all the other madcap comedy and that was what I was determined to bring to the film. So both are very legit, and the audience can always decide but I think you get no better sense of distinction between the two versions than the movie and the series. 2) Did you have any specific actors you wanted in mind when you began planning out the movie? I think Meryl Streep was really -walking in immediately to try to start putting the film together- the one actor I knew in my dream of dreams would be perfect for Aunt Josephine, so that was an early conversation with her agent Kevin Huvane. It happened that she had a daughter who was a tremendous fan of the books and so there wasn't a lot of convincing, she was very excited to join the effort. Other than Meryl, we knew what we needed out of these young actors and just dove into trying to find them. Emily Browning presented herself early on, my casting director Avy Kaufman has just got such a wide breadth of knowledge of up and coming actors from all over the globe and she also pointed us to Liam Aiken. Again, both very early candidates, both came in to meet me, Emily came in from Australia and Liam came in from the east coast and they got those parts really before there was any major contest. I think I had the idea for Billy Connolly because I just think Billy is such a huge warm unexpected presence and he seemed to make just great sense for that part. Likewise, Tim Spall, it's like when you think about the essence of Mr Poe and who that actor is going to be. He can just make you enjoy him bumbling and handing the kids off into horrendous situations, really standing in for all adults in a way. The rest was just meeting all these fantastic other comic and improvisational actors along the way. 3) Were you on board when the production considered filming in Wilmington, NC? If so, did you scout any location in that area? As someone who lived there for a long time, I love thinking about the alternate version of history where the film was produced there. Especially since, according to some articles from 2003, sets for the Sonnenfeld iteration had already begun construction there. Is that true? When I stepped in (along with DreamWorks) to start to build the movie from the ground up there was no Wilmington, North Carolina conversation. I think that had been a budgetary solution that was being explored back in the Rudin and Barry Sonnenfeld iteration, partly because of how the costs had grown so huge. At the time I knew we were going to basically be doing a mostly set-bound film. I sat in a room with Steven Spielberg and Sherry Lansing and Steven kindly asked me where I wanted to make the film. Jim Carrey was also in that room, and I said " I'd really like to take advantage of all of the incredible artisans here in Los Angeles given how handmade this film is going to be". Jim, of course, weighed in and said "absolutely, I would like to do it here as well" and so there wasn't much of a conversation at that point. So we did, between Paramount and then down in Downey at the old Boeing facility where they had made the space shuttle. Originally, I scouted a bit to the east coast and Rick Heinrichs and I very quickly just came to realize that to honor the illustrated, handmade quality of the world that Daniel had created, just stepping out into the real world was sort of going to fail the film. It was just a little bit too much in the here and now and so we committed wholly to constructing both our interiors and exteriors with some incredible forced perspective sets. We created our own Lake, on which we had four standing sets concurrently, so that was a bit of an exploration. Back east, we did use a photograph of a home on Constitution Avenue in Boston as the Baudelaire home but that's truly the only actual real-world location in the film. Just an addendum to the third question, no there were no sets under construction. Before the original production dissolved there were many set designs and some models that were created but there was no construction and so those never came to fruition. 4) Over the years a number of rumors about the movie have popped up on Internet sites and been accepted as fact by websites like Buzzfeed. Two of the most popular are that the Baudelaires' mother in the flashback sequences was played by either an uncredited Amy Brenneman or Helena Bonham Carter and that the ending of the film originally had Olaf tailing the children in disguise. Are either of these true? If not, were they ever planned to happen at any point? Yes, my wife Amy Brenneman is indeed the silhouette in the silhouettes of the Baudelaire parents and she's also photographed with my production designer Rick Heinrichs (who stood in for me for the Baudelaire father in the on-set photography). At the time she teased me because I'd had her also play a deceased mother in Casper, so she was convinced I was sending her message, but it was not the case. I just thought she would be perfect for that. No, I think that any concept of Olaf tailing the children in disguise again may have been some element from the original Rudin production. In our case, we were always were going to just be with the Baudelaires, who again triumph through adversity and who get to finally close their eyes and rest the end of the picture. Which is very much an image I had in my head from early on. So, no there was no alternate ending in the end that was envisioned. 5) Was having a narrator throughout the film a controversial decision or was it already agreed upon? What was it like trying to integrate him throughout the scenes to set the mood and storyline? I wouldn't say that the narrator was controversial, it was quite the opposite. For me, what was controversial and pretty much unacceptable was having Lemony Snicket on-screen, visible to the audience. It just seemed to betray the concept in the book and every time I would, as a reader, not really be able to picture where Lemony Snicket was but knowing suddenly that he was in a room with water filling up etc. Again, I wanted that to be mysterious, to feel like he was on the case and definitely a detective (somewhat in the future looking back at these events) but no, the studios were both very much in agreement. What was great was it allowed me to ask Jude Law whom I knew (and Steven Spielberg knew as well from A.I.). It made it easy to ask him to come in, both to do the narration but also the very fun day of shooting that I planned, with him in the clock tower and dashing about. Again still mostly in silhouette and unrecognizable, but that is indeed Jude. 6) Many of your films deal with issues of ordinary people struggling with the death/absence of loved ones, thrust into extraordinary situations. Is this a theme or concept you have actively sought out in your work? I had a great mentor back in graduate school who shared with me the truism that "we as filmmakers and artists, we're not really always aware of the stories that we will tell again and again in many different iterations but they are the stories that we are supposed to tell". So I have never actively sought out stories of loss or loved ones contending with the aftermath of loss. They have always been something that obviously I feel I have a kinship to and a knowledge of, but the amazing thing in filmmaking is stories find you as well as you find them. So when I was asked to take a look at these books, I felt a kinship with them and as I say that's where my vision probably varied pretty immediately from what the Rudin/Sonnenfeld film would have been. But again that was not something I was seeking out, it's just what happens. That was true of Casper, where Steven Spielberg in that case might tell you that he came to me with that because of this sort of emotional underpinning that I am often keen to have a film. But again, not something that I sought out so that is the great mystery of art. We have stories to tell and we will tell them many different ways but not necessarily consciously. 7) Your films run the gamut from independent dramas to big-budget PG-13 genre comedies, what do you look for in a project, as both a storyteller and director? I used to have journalists at press junkets begin an interview saying "wow this film is quite a departure for you" and then they would eventually stop because they would realize that each one of the films was a departure. And that's by design, I just go where there is a story that I feel insight to, that moves me, that excites me. And that can be a $2,000,000 movie or $150,000,000 movie, it does not matter. What matters is my having a sense that I know a secret and that I can share that secret with the audience and that this particular story gives me the language in which to share that secret. So I am always drawn to stories and unlikely and unusual canvases but it's always characters first and some sense of emotional truth. Whether that's a comedy, a fantasy, or an out and out drama. So that makes it a little difficult for people to second guess what I'm going to be up to next; it's what keeps me interested. 8) One of the scenes that spoke to me most in the film was the simple and intimate sequence between the Baudelaires in Olaf's attic bedroom after he slaps Klaus, where the idea of the letter that never came is first introduced. What I love about it is that it always felt very real and touching and the performances between Emily and Liam are particularly strong. What was it like, to bring this scene to life from a Directing perspective? The attic scene with the Baudelaires after Olaf strikes Klaus. I always knew that was going to be the emotional anchor. Certainly the legitimacy, emotionally of the children's plight in the film. I knew that in casting the actors I had, they would have the ability to play the honesty of that scene, the same way that you don't try to play for comedy in a comedy. You try to play the truth of an obstacle. Likewise, regardless of what our film was in terms of comedic tone and things that might be larger than life, the pain of Klaus in feeling betrayed by his parents, I knew had to come across. As well as Emily-as-Violet's tremendous care for her siblings. So that's what we went to work on with both the actors. I said to them both that "this has to come from a place of truth and you're going to do your own homework and find where you have had those betrayals." "You'll never have to share them with me but I'm going to know if you are just acting/pretending versus finding something really resonant and truthful for you". They both did a fantastic job. 9) Do you have any favourite moments during production? Not necessarily your favourite scene, but something that happened that you won't forget. There were plenty of unforgettable elements to our production. One I can point to, which somewhere is captured on film, was an accident. It was a malfunction when we were preparing Aunt Josephine's house for the hurricane sequence. Michael Lantieri (my on-set effects designer) was tasked with constructing a foundation that was raised for this house which could drop on cue but still not have the set collapse, in terms of just falling apart entirely. It needed to essentially have the first big drop that I could capture on-set before we would finish the rest off with our scale model at ILM when the house eventually falls. The central support was like a giant piston which would then give way on cue and there was an emergency stop; a certain stage below which the house was not supposed to drop on this gimble. I was on set with my camera and with a couple of other people, certainly no actors. This was not the day the house was going to be photographed yet, it was just a test. Sure enough, we rolled film and when the mechanism was fired, the entire thing dropped on this gimble and went well past the safety stop. It was quite a sight, you saw objects, people, everybody, suddenly suspended in the air before coming crashing down. It's a pretty remarkable piece of film and word got out to the studio very quickly that there had been a mishap on-set and my executives came down to make sure we were okay. I landed square on my bum, fortunately, I didn't break my tailbone but it was pretty exciting. We had a very dry assistant to the on-set effects guy who after the glass has shattered and everybody was speechless, he spoke up and simply said "and that's why we test it". So that was among the more memorable moments. 10) How did you manage to make Kara and Shelby Hoffman perform as well and convincingly as Sunny Baudelaire? Was there a time when they spontaneously acted out of the script that you liked their natural reaction the most and left it in the movie? What's remarkable about the Hoffman twins that everyone has to remember is that they were 14 months old when we began working with them. I mean that's incredible. Originally to try to help ourselves with the schedule I had cast a set of triplets and the challenge was always hoping and knowing that you really wouldn't have a sense of if they could work if they would have separation anxiety, or any of these things until you got there. As much we tried to set up playdates and get a sense of the original triplets, it was apparent on day one that there was going to be an issue. Their parents were lovely people who had literally moved home out to California from Washington DC to be able to do this but it was apparent that that was not going to happen. So we went to a very quick casting mode to try to come up with the replacements and those were the Hoffmans. Interestingly, just to show you the personalities of twins; Kara was definitely the more reticent of the two. Shelby loved to work, she was just a sunny happy kid and Kara was very bright but always a bit more sceptical about the work portion of it. So there's no doubt that Shelby has more screen time in the film but one of the challenges you have is the work hours; you cannot work little ones that age past a certain point. So you have to make the most of them and for me as a director that was about trying to get to what the story essence was of every moment with them and their interaction with either their siblings or with Olaf and even at that age treat them with the degree of respect. Which is to set up a good game of make-believe; these girls were so bright that they could. But of course, what you do is you let that camera roll because there may be some wonderful surprises, unexpected reactions/behaviours, and you as a director are a thief, you have to steal the best of those. Of course, you also have to remember that Sunny is subtitled and so the other advantage is that if there was a terrific reaction or some piece of behaviour, we could always write back to it. So there was some writing in post-production that we did just keying off of the work from the girls. Kara was really set off by the stand-in we had for the incredibly deadly viper (which we needed to be able to show scale and to rehearse with) she did not like that viper so that put her off work for have a good bit of time. We finally got her back but she did not trust certain elements on set, but Shelby always did. You know it's an unusual thing to have to build in naptime to the schedule of your actors and sure enough, there was a teamster dedicated to driving the girls around in a van to help with naptime so you can't beat that. 11) There are some recurring elements from the books that were played down in the film, such as Mr Poe's coughing fits and Klaus' glasses. May I ask why? It's funny, film is a very visceral medium and elements of sound and visuals are so strong and striking that often story can be told with them more quickly and effectively. The corollary to that is that once you've set up certain elements in film, if you keep going back to the well with those, because of how visceral they are they can become repetitive or annoying. So interestingly, Mr Poe's cough was something we discovered early on that simply felt like a bit of an annoyance and a stall; in that, it wasn't actually helping us. So that's the difference between film and prose on a page. Klaus' glasses were an interesting case, for the moment one sees them, brief as it is. I was particularly uncomfortable with how close in the illustrations Klaus' glasses looked to Harry Potter's, and I worried that it was going to feel derivative. So we made two decisions when was that yes, Klaus would have some glasses for reading but we designed them to be rimless and nose pinching, I thought they just looked fantastic. You have to remember that this was 2003/2004, sort of the height of the Potter fandom; it struck me that the on-screen character deserved his own identity and didn't want to seem like a Harry wannabe. So again, that was the visceral nature of film for me dictating let's go a different direction, which Daniel was completely supportive of. 12) What did the average day on set look like during filming? Lemony Snicket was a film where there really were no average days. It was like making many different movies, mostly driven by the different environments that we would be visiting in each of these sequences. So that meant again taking over most of the major sound stages at Paramount and then eventually in the spring of '04, moving down to Downey, to the Boeing plant. Downey was really home to not only Lake Lachrymose but also Briny Beach, Curdled Cave and then obviously the Aunt Josephine's demise sequence in the lake. So the exciting thing was that jumping into a new set was like jumping into a new movie and we had so many, so as a result there really was no average day. It was a very long schedule. The variables that you can consider; you've got 2 teenage actors who have a certain number of hours of schooling, you have infants who were 14 months as we began with very restrictive work hours, you had a lead actor who boasts close to 4 hours of make up each day. Jim also had (as most movie stars certainly did back in that moment) what's called a portal-to-portal deal where he was expected to be picked up and dropped off back home within a 12 hour period. The combination of those variables made for an incredibly challenging schedule so again no average. There were days when I just felt like I was a miner going into the mines with my cap on, to make more film. Every day was different, every day was exciting but it was a marathon, not a sprint. 13) Some pages from an early draft of the script were leaked and featured a subplot with an unidentified woman and two young children following the Baudelaires throughout the story. It's quite a big departure from the story in the first three books, how far into the process of making the film did this element survive? Even after you took over the film, were there any elements from later drafts of the script that ended up having to be changed or cut? Again, there were many departures in the Rudin And Daniel Handler draft, which Barry was going to direct, many of which I've already forgotten in specific. But they departed greatly from the books. Not sure exactly where that came from, though as I say, I think Daniel was enjoying riffing on his world, maybe wanting to do something new with that world. I had the advantage of being a new reader and so, as a result, I was much more of a fundamentalist and strict constructionist in really wanting to present more closely the world he had on paper. Our challenge was that we didn't want a film that was strictly episodic and so that is why while tackling the first 3 books we created a structure that ended with the Marvelous Marriage. As opposed to where it finishes at the end of the first book. We wanted to find a way for there to be sort of an overarching narrative. I can't speak to a number of the other sort of departures that were in the more madcap version of the script. 14) The score for that movie is perfect! Did you immediately think of Thomas Newman when planning the score? What was the process of working with him like? How did he present themes and ideas and what was the early creation process like on the score? I've always been one of Tom Newman's biggest fans and had always wanted to work with him. I believed in my bones the moment I came onto this picture that he would be the perfect man for the job. I had just seen the work he had done in Finding Nemo and once again was marvelling at his ability to create an emotional landscape that's genuine while also diving into new worlds. So I reached out to him straight away and he was very excited to come on and to join. There were really no cues left behind, regardless of rumours, the only cue I substituted on the stage (meaning the mixing stage) was indeed the train track cue. I found that the cue Tom created, which is represented on the soundtrack, didn't have the fullness and drive and dynamics that I wanted for that sequence and the suspense in that sequence. So I didn't believe it fully served the story purpose as well as it could have and that was the only cue that we had a difference of opinion on. But his incredible music editor was able to help construct the cue that made its way into the film. I decided late in post-production to try to create the credit sequence at the end of the film, which I'm very proud of. I wanted it to be essentially an emotional coda, almost a dream-like coda for the whole film where we leave our young characters asleep in the back of Mr Poe's car. The wonderful curtain goes up and then you head into these essentially two-dimensional shadow puppets. Tom had scored the whole picture (there's a lot of music in the film, we had so many sessions). So I didn't want to burden him with suddenly saying "oh, by the way, I've got a gigantic new cue for you to write". That said, I did want to let him know about it and Tom is a perfectionist and he's very proud, but he can also be his own toughest critic. So when I did tell him, he was like "oh man, I can't believe it, how am I supposed to accomplish that?" and I said to him "you don't have to". "I will work with Bill your incredible music editor we will cook up something from all this terrific score we have, we will do it". And sure enough, I believe it was the next day, maybe two days later, he called me and said: "well, okay, listen to this". Then he played me that awesome cue that begins once the last scene scores out and carries you through that whole sequence. It has a different flavour than a lot of the rest of the score, it sounded very exotic, it's perfect and it's just a fantastic vibe. So that's Tom Newman to the T; can't ever let it go, wants to contribute, and so we had a fantastic partnership. 15) As an Editor & Composer myself, I've always wanted to know the story behind the music edit on the Train Sequence. I'm curious what the creative reasons may have been for replacing most of the original track with segments of other parts of the score. Articles from the time, say that he had over 30 scoring sessions for the film spanning nearly a year, was there any other music that was recorded for the film but never used? Have there ever been any talks about releasing more music from the film? As to the process with Tom, it's really organic. I ran the picture for him to let him stew in the juices in the movie and then I would come over to his home studio and he would begin to play thematic elements to me. In some cases, he had a pretty clear idea of where those might live but other times not, which I loved. He would say "I'm feeling this and I don't know where it belongs but does this make sense to you and if it does let's find it together" and so we would hunt through the movie and see where some of these elements might live and see which ones would develop. The orchestral elements he will do last, he loves to pull together what he calls his "cats", his very specific musician friends to play some of the more interesting acoustic unusual elements that you often hear in Tom scores. He'll do those sessions now in his home studio but at that point in time he was still doing them over in a place called 'Village' in Santa Monica. Those are recorded and edited so that then going to the orchestral stage they exist to play against picture. So as he goes to conduct he can then listen to his orchestral takes meshed with the acoustic elements. It's an organic and really exciting way to work and super intimate just the two of you and then his music editor Bill, who is also wonderful. A great process. 16) You've mentioned before in interviews that there was a little bit of tension with the studio over cutting elements deemed "too dark" from the film. What, if anything, can you say about the post-production process and the conflicts in the editing room? To be more specific, what was the process of test screening, recutting and rescreening the film like? Were there any sequences, lines, or characters that had to end up being cut out of the film? On a film like Lemony Snicket, you are dealing with some very specific tensions. You're dealing with a very large budget, and larger budgets tend to mean that a studio hopes to capture as wide an audience as possible. And you had a property whose entire marketing campaign in book form was "Don't read this book, whatever you do, don't read further". You know, the sort of wonderful anti-sell that was so exciting and smart and inventive about the Lemony Snicket books. And interestingly, we knew from the beginning that there would be potentially some nervousness on the part of the studios. Though we tried to remind them at every turn that this is why these books are a hit and why you have a rabid fan base, because of that tone and that commitment to that tone. I actually did something in prep to try to help remind the studios, specifically Paramount, of this and I brought a bunch of young school-aged kids into my art department on a weekday afternoon and essentially videotaped a town hall meeting with them. I asked them questions and showed them artwork of sets I was going to build and what props were going to look like and essentially got them to reinforce that the darkest elements of Lemony Snicket were why they were there. I truly would say "well okay, yes, in the books Count Olaf murders any number of characters, he really actually kills Uncle Monty, but you don't want to see that in the movie" and the kids would yell "yes we have to!" So we cut and put together this presentation to give to the studios, to give them some courage to try to help them, but we knew it would be a challenge all the way through. And so certainly that was the case, it was a lot of hand-holding, in terms of the sort of wonderful darker handmade palette of the film. Because again, you're going back to the heart of fables and fairy tales which were not sunny. They were allowing young readers to kind of touch the darkness and then feel safe and feel smarter than. So we knew we had to walk that walk and fight that struggle in production which we did. Post-production was no different, I've never tested a movie more. And that was again because you understandably had studios with a major financial commitment who just wanted to make sure that it wasn't just the young people who were going to like the movie. They didn't want the parents of those kids coming to the film and feeling like we killed off the mom vote or the dad vote, down to the score. At one point there was concern that the score was too dark and I was very adamant that it was not only perfect for the movie but that once the score was allowed to be run (which would only happen when we finally mixed the film) that it was going to only provide, if you will, stronger scores. Indeed there was a night where we tested, side by side in 2 different theatres, the very same edit with a temp score that was deemed to be more playful (not all the way through, but a lighter score) and then Tom finally allowed me, for that test, to use his score. He was always understandably worried about what he would call "crib death". Which is sometimes if a composer scores a picture and they use the actual score at a test screening, if for some reason the test screening doesn't go well, scores have been known to be tossed. So he was desperate not to see that happen, but I said to him in the end, "I need your score because I need to prove them all wrong". We tested both, the very same picture with Tom's score, huge. More than 10% stronger final score in the tally and so everybody breathed a sigh of relief, the studios were both very supportive suddenly and off we went. Again though, this is normal for a major investment. If you're making a 2 million dollar or a 5 million dollar independent drama, you just don't have as many constituencies and you need to know this as a filmmaker. So I was not surprised, it's just a level of energy that one has to keep alive even while you're going through this marathon. You need to keep up the energy to arm wrestle and to try to protect the film. What's interesting is the whole notion of director's cuts. I think, without exception, I've never made a picture yet where (other than some small specifics) I've ever felt like my cut of the film is truly divergent from the release version of the film. They really do feel like my edit, and I know that holds true here, too. Part of what you're testing is the audience's patience as well. There are so many elements that we all love. We love to set up, we love the character setups, we love the world, but you are telling a story and engaging an audience as well. You do make some choices along the way for compression, that are about keeping the energy and flow of that narrative up for the audience. So that's not so much a studio saying, "lose that, lose that". It's your own metronome as a filmmaker and knowing that you need to not just get overindulgent in areas. 17) While I love the film's ending, some of it seems to have been cobbled together, with narration playing over reused clips from the film and shots from deleted scenes. Was this always the intent, and if not, what was your original plan for the ending? The ending narration for the film was designed from the get-go. I'd always intended to basically give that sense of how Lemony has to move on from each temporary hiding spot in trying to tell this tale and hand off his pages. So I had visited a clock tower in Lowell, Massachusetts when I was scouting with Rick and I said: "that is where Lemony should be in our film and that is where he should leave this instalment to be found". So that was always by design as well as then finally ending with Baudelaires seen driving away and being in the car with them. This is the great part about editing a film, as you know with films, you're directing on the page as you write, you're directing when you're on set, you're directing when you're editing. It's not a fixed proposition, discoveries are made and often they're just on instinct and ephemeral and I had a real instinct that I wanted to see their faces one more time in these particular vignettes. Even as Lemony is reminding you of their qualities together, their particular skills, their resilience, and so the idea of 'going around the horn', revisiting images, was discovered in post out of a pure emotional endeavour. There's an image of Sunny chasing after what looks like a little red ball and that was actually just the target that we had for Sunny, chasing after the tale of the viper. It was a clip that we didn't use and yet I loved how playful Shelby was and so we just used it and made it a little magical prop that was sort of like dashing off away from her. The shape, the narration, all of that was as intended but plugging back into these moments and re-visiting them from the film is something we discovered in the cutting room. 18) Before the Netflix tv show came out, a sequel was in development for many years, going through many different iterations. Including a direct sequel that picked up immediately after the ending of the first movie, and a potential animated reboot. Were you involved with any of these, and did you have any particular actors or visual ideas in mind? Within a month of the film's release, there was an early conversation about a sequel and that conversation was between DreamWorks and Paramount who had both financed the film. There were some real differences of opinions and there were certainly concerns about the budget; the original film was very expensive. Actually, the first time I met Sherry Lansing (the head of Paramount) to talk with her about making the film (much as it would have exhausted me) I asked her "why not make the first 2 films at the same time?" Just to essentially save money and have the economies of doing two pictures, amortizing some of the costs of sets. Because the books were clearly already a hit, so it wasn't a risk, it just seemed like a wiser move and Sherry interestingly felt too superstitious to do so. So by the time the movie opened and the studios got into conversations, there was just essentially dissent as to whether to specifically do a direct pick-up and again try to combine multiple books versus essentially committing to, for example, The Austere Academy as a standalone narrative. I think it was the elements of cost, obviously, Jim Carrey's fee was only going to grow, so I think the two parties couldn't quite decide what they wished to do. So over time, the option for the series made its way over 20th Century Fox. I think Paramount and DreamWorks ended up in a stalemate and so let it go and it moved over to Fox. Daniel was involved there. Nothing moved forward and so by 2006 I just had a crazy idea and I said to Daniel "you know, one thing that just might be fantastic would be if we get meta about this and basically try to move the series along in an entirely different art form". Meaning, say to the audience upfront that the actors have taken far too long in this dramatization and even potentially see Jim l storming out of the make-up trailer with his little tissue around his neck and being locked out of the soundstage. Lemony essentially telling us that "now, I'm afraid I need to tell you the story as it really was", and my pitch was let's go do it as stop motion. Let's literally step aside from these conversations of endless budgetary issues and actor scheduling issues. I think I was emboldened by the end credit sequence in the movie, which I just adored, and just reminded me that it's a very essential human story you're telling that's very artful and so why not? Why not, in a way say, that the first film was really just a dramatization but that it was going to continue down its real form. Daniel said "yeah, and then the next film can be told in an entirely different art form". So anyway, we were a little ahead of our time and nobody quite bit on that one but we just both thought that would have been a fantastic way to go. So things went nowhere until the dawn of streaming and when I saw that they were going to try to make the series and Barry was going to try, it did seem like the perfect venue. Because instead of having to fight the challenges of the episodic nature, in trying to combine books into a feature, the idea of being able to actually just go a book at a time, made great sense to me. So I was happy for the form finally fitting well and for Barry to be able to get his tone as he had always imagined it there, as well. 19) What was your favourite scene in the finished film? I don't know that I'd say that I have a true favourite scene in the film. I really adore all of what went into making the hurricane sequence. In imagination, in terms of craftsmanship, in terms of all of the cinematic tools put to work. So I would say, for sure, from the beginning of that sequence until the Baudelaires basically make their way over and the house tumbles down into the waters below. That's certainly amongst my favourites and was quite a piece of work to accomplish. 20) What was your favourite book of the series, and which one would you have liked to adapt most? I have a recollection of The Austere Academy and The Vile Village being particular favourites in the remaining books of Daniel's series. I just think the Austere Academy's characters and the emotional pain and truth of being put off into separate awful dingy living spots. Headmaster Nero and his endless horrendous violin concerts, it all felt true to teenage middle age and middle school challenges but it was so Lemony. So I had been very much a proponent of that being essentially a standalone picture if we had made an immediate follow up. I just also love that Vile Village felt like an old Universal horror movie to me in terms of that setting, the kids' ingenuity and having to break out of jail. That's a particularly strong Klaus story (can't always be about Violet all the time, Klaus has to have his day). So I really did love those, but so many of the other ones are great, those were just the standouts for me. 21) What were your visual and thematic inspirations for the film? What became immediately apparent to me was my desire to get down to visual graphic essentials. So essentially, that's very much a theatrical concept, that is why we knew we wanted to build our interiors and exteriors on set. It's painted backings, it's forced perspective work. Interestingly, you do connect with reference and inspiration in a way that's magical when you're preparing a film, I really believe you open yourself up and as you're getting a sense of it sometimes things fall in your path. The photographic work of the British still photographer Michael Kenna became kind of a Bible to me. He photographs real-world landscapes, he's done them in Japan, he's done them in the UK, very graphic, very essential, very few elements. They look incredibly theatrical because of how spare they are and how graphic. So I just started making photocopies of my favourites with Rick we would sit and break down what worked about them. It was the inspiration for Briny Beach, it was the inspiration for so many elements in the film. And again, in a sort of old stagecraft vein 'Night of the Hunter', the incredible Charles Laughton film, I screened again and again. I screened that for the art department, screened it for 'Chivo' (our cinematographer), I screened it with the cast. I just thought, in essence, we were doing a version of Night of the Hunter, which has some incredibly similar themes but for a wider audience. Some of the bold techniques of stagecraft and forced perspective miniature work in that film. Count Olaf sitting in the hallway at Uncle Monty's was a very specific homage I created to Mitchum in Night of the Hunter, that sense of sort of evil lurking and rocking in a rocking chair. 22) Did you have any contact with anyone developing the tie-in video games and the marketing? If so, what were they given as far as production assets go? Given that they had to start working on them in advance of shooting, was there anything they had to change as story ideas were dropped or reconfigured? I honestly didn't have a lot of contact with the video game production, which absolutely had to be underway, even as we were making the film. I can't say that any choices we made forced them to alter their plan, but we really were not collaborating. I know they were borrowing assets from our art department, and certainly trying to live within the design and palette of the movie. But we were so busy, just making the picture and getting it ready for its release that we really didn't get involved. I certainly didn't. So I can't really speak to that. 23) I think the best scene in the movie is the destruction of Aunt Josephine's house. What was the creative process of planning and shooting, such a breathtaking action sequence like? I spoke earlier about my affection for the Hurricane Herman sequence where Aunt Josephine's house gets torn apart. Essentially, as in many sequences that require incredible coordination between the art department, construction, wardrobe, and on set effects, I storyboarded the sequence to basically make sure everyone was dialled into what my planning was going to be. From that, we would then break down "yes, okay here's where the house -on camera- needs to fall to a certain point, here is where we're going to have a digital painting, here's where we're going to need this piece of on-set effects work with the hot gas leak". And then going through safety planning, what portion is the kids, what portion is not. Actually, what's remarkable is it was all eventually planned so well enough that a lot of the wider pieces of the kids trying to make their way uphill, even as the house is starting to come down, all of that was actually the kids. So it was just the most first-person experience I could imagine, being inside a structure like that, even if you're making incredible discoveries about your family that you've been waiting to get and suddenly that's happening in the tumult of a hurricane. So great fun to imagine and just tremendous artists who I was able to collaborate with to pull it off. 24) Given that your excellent suggested idea for a teaser trailer (as mentioned on the DVD), and the prototype version you made from the costume tests you shot, did you have any involvement with the film's marketing? What are your thoughts on how the film was eventually marketed? As I mentioned earlier, we knew marketing was going to be a constant tug of war but we really did believe that if you didn't honour the sort of wonderfully playfully dark anti-sell of the books it would be confusing to the audience. They might not really understand what the picture was going to be. So I wanted to take advantage of the wardrobe camera tests we were doing, to sort of give a direct to camera address of presenting these characters and the poise that they have, which was great fun. Yeah, myself, Jim Carrey, and certainly our producers remained very involved in the marketing of the film. Again, that's not to say that it wasn't without a lot of arm wrestling. I think in the end the studio was trying to kind of ride a line where they could play up what was playful and the film and not potentially alienate a family audience that might not know the books. Again, the bigger the investment, the more they want to capture a wide group. But we wanted to make sure that the varied tone that brought us all to the table was alive and intact, so it was it was a challenge. But it was one that all parties were understanding of each other's sides and Jim, along with me, knew why he was there and so we were very clear with the studio marketing team at Paramount and vice versa. So it was an iterative process, many iterations of trailers and one-sheets and so I was glad that I ate my Wheaties late in the game so we still had some energy to go through those discussions. 25) What is your favourite moment/element of the film which seems to get very little recognition by people? I don't know that there are particular elements in the film that I wish got more recognition. I certainly know there are elements that I wish I had more screen material to play with. I thought that the main dock at Lake Lachrymose when the Baudelaires first arrive, Rick Heinrichs, designed such an incredible set and I only wish that I'd had more material to play out on the streets of the town because it was just extraordinary what he did. Again, all in forced perspective. It's a true piece of artistry, so that's more my own regret. I wish there had been more material there for me to play with. I will always enjoy the day I had with Dustin Hoffman. Dustin and I had just done a film together and he was friends with Billy Connolly and I said "I think it'd be genius if you came and played a theatre critic and just come for the day and we'll get you in wardrobe and hair" and we had a blast. I do enjoy his presence in the movie, brief as it is, to the point that some people actually miss it, but it was very fun. I think if the audience knew the rings of challenges to get the film on-screen that we did, I think they'd be a bit dumbfounded but the nice thing is they don't have to worry about that. They get to just enjoy the film. 26) Given the success of the #releasetheSnydercut movement, have you ever considered revisiting the film in some way? Perhaps even putting together your own director's cut of the film? I don't really believe that there's a director's cut of the film that lives beyond where I landed. One of the great things in DVD culture and before that laserdisc culture( which I was a part of) is the ability to have all of those fantastic deleted scenes and other elements. But we do make choices in editorial for a reason, we're serving the best purposes of the picture. Now there are cases where films have sort of left the hands of those directors that audiences may not be aware of and studios have taken over. But as I mentioned earlier, I haven't had that experience and so while I really enjoyed the audience being able to take in some of the other really fun work that we did, the choices were made for a reason. I think a lot of the scenes with his terrible theatre troupe; that's a short film. It's funny, Ben Kingsley (who I did a film with) made a wonderful short for Marvel about a side character that he had played in Iron Man 3. Had we had the opportunity back then, that would have been what I would have loved to have done. There's so much material, those actors were so fantastic, and we just had a ball with all of Olaf's awful acting classes and the work being done by each of those. But again, they didn't serve the story and when I did my first passes on the sequences, things would just grind to a halt. We would be enjoying ourselves tremendously with what that work was but it's the challenge of balancing out editing an entire narrative. If was asked by the studio to sign off on a new director's cut, I wouldn't find myself putting that work in. We lost very few battles, one of them that we did was that the studios found Aunt Josephine's demise is too frightening, too visceral for audiences. Now we didn't literally see her face being eaten off by a Lachrymose Leech, but we did see her in the water slowly descending, her face disappearing beneath the surface. It's incredible work that we did with Meryl and with our leeches, and that's the only moment in the picture for me that both studios ended up agreeing that we really needed to alter. So that's why we had the sort of little banana resurfacing at the end to pay off the Sunny element. But I'm certainly not going to release a director's cut just to swap out the end of Josephine's demise. But if I were, that would be probably the element. Meryl was very sweet, she knew exactly what happened and she gave me a big hug. 27) Would you ever like to return to the world of Lemony Snicket and do you have anything in mind for the film's rapidly approaching 20th anniversary? Is there anything about the movie that you would do differently today? At this point in time Lemony Snicket feels like such a complete experience for me as it is. You just never say never as a storyteller but I am grateful for what was such a such a very complete and long experience. No specifics as of yet, the picture's release was in 2004 so no doubt as we get toward '24 we'll be looking at some elements. There may be some very fun pieces that we'll be able to pull back together, but nothing is planned as of yet. But when I think back on the film, I am grateful that the studios allowed us to make the picture the way we wanted to make it. That was for almost all intents and purposes in front of the camera, not a giant CG-laden mess. With incredible set construction, just more sets than we could count and painted backings. So many elements that today even back in 2003 and 2004; one would be really pressured to hand so much more of that over to visual effects. But real light on real surfaces always moves me and I can always smell when it is not that. So for the studio to back us on this crazy concept of doing it as a completely stage-driven movie without over-reliance on computer-generated visual effects is really one of the great victories of the movie. One that I'm still grateful for. That would not be something that I would change, it would be something that I would desperately hope to hang on to, but any new version of that film today would be under tremendous pressure to sort of bring it into the digital design world. 28) Are there any questions we should have asked? I think the only question I'm not seeing here, which may be answered on the DVD, but nonetheless was always of great enjoyment, was the element of improvisation. People have often asked, given Jim's presence in the film, what portions were improvised. I just had an instinct when I was shooting makeup and hair tests and wardrobe tests with Jim Carrey, that I wanted to get to know these different characters, these different iterations that Olaf was going try to pull off. What better moment than without the entire crew and without the entire expense of the production being up and running, but in a smaller setting to frankly just interview these characters. Normally when we shoot make-up, hair, wardrobe tests there is no sound recording it's just a visual. But I did ask to have the sound mixer present for the day and so I essentially sat by the lens and interviewed these different characters. We felt this magic happening even as we were doing it and so Jim and I looked at each other and knew. So essentially, once the dailies came in, we sat and kind of together wove together elements that we really thought worked for these characters and then wrote those back into the script. So they were not improvised on the day, they were improvised in preparation for the film and it was a really educational process. We had an iteration of Stefano that didn't work; it felt very on the nose and almost sort of Pirates of Penzance. We looked at the dailies and I just looked at Jim and I said "I think it's not it" and he was bummed but agreed. Then out came this incredible discovery that he and Bill Corso made in the makeup trailer of this strange bad comb-over with the mustache askew with Jim sort of doing a National Geographic fellow. I fell over and said "that's that" so we quickly got him onto the stage for me to interview him and that is where all that material comes from. That's one process that was magical in the film which many people who have watched the DVD carefully probably know but it was unique and a real gift to the various Olaf characters in the film.

#Brad Silberling #lemony snicket #ASoUE #lemony snicket's a series of unfortunate events #jim carrey

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shiningsagittarius · 3 years

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Why The Shilo Scene Is The Most Emotionally Evocative Scene In TMBS (In My Humble Opinion) And Why It Resonated With Me So Damn Much

While watching episode 5 of TMBS (The Art of Conveyance and Round-Trippery), the scene involving Constance solving the riddle given to the group by Mr. Benedict (25:37-27:41) became my favorite scene in the book-to-screen adaptation, and continued to resonate with me after the first season was over. It took me a while to piece together exactly why this scene moved me more than any other, but I think I finally have a few thoughts put together, which I will now attempt to sort through here.

Expectations For The Show

I think the first and most vital thought I have regarding this scene involves how my overall expectations and hopes for this adaptation have shifted. If you had asked me a few years ago what my perfect book-to-screen adaptation would look like (for any book), I would have said “a beat-for-beat adaptation with no changes to the source material” bar none. As the years have passed, however, I became interested in following how a book-to-screen adaptation is made. From this, I have actually come to appreciate some of the changes made to tighten the script, portray the worldbuilding, and develop the characters in a new and exciting way which stem from creating a television or movie script. (Some. Not all. But that’s another essay for another day.) If my interest no longer lies in seeing a 100% faithful adaptation, then, what exactly am I expecting to experience when watching The Mysterious Benedict Society? I asked myself this question, and the answer ended up being “I want this show to make me feel nostalgic.” As much as I wanted the show to make me feel nostalgic towards the book in general, I also wanted this show to bring me back to when I was reading the books for the first time. How did I experience the world? What did I think and feel? Evidently, seeing Constance solving the puzzle made me think about that time in my life and the endless imagination I had:

I used to play in my yard with my sister and kids from my neighborhood for HOURS. I happen to live in a rather woodsy suburb near a lake, so the environment Constance is in immediately started ringing bells in my mind

A lot of my pretend play was based on espionage and adventure and puzzle solving, which is partially why I adored these books so much in the first place

Seeing Constance alone, alongside the song celebrating an imaginary friend, brought back the bittersweet feeling of playing by myself sometimes, but learning how to enjoy it and even becoming a fan of occasional solitude

As I said in my review of the episode, these are life or death stakes for Constance, but this scene ironically brought me back to the happier, more carefree moments of my childhood. Of course, this scene is poignant beyond the personal connections I found. It is also a turning point for the audience’s perception of Constance.

Constance’s Character Development

Before this scene, I don’t believe there were any moments where Constance is entirely alone (at least, none that the audience gets to see). Throughout the show, Constance struggles with being taken seriously by her friends. She knows she is strong and more than capable of aiding the mission, but time and time again, she is passed over entirely or given menial tasks as her contributions to the team. Of course, she doesn’t help her case by insulting her friends or acting obstinate. It’s quite… contrary- she wants to prove herself to the society and help stop the Emergency, but she also puts a wall between herself and the rest of the team. This is why having her first scene alone be her reaction to the copper waves is so emotionally powerful. There she is, completely dwarfed by the statue, all alone. She looks up in awe, murmurs “It’s beautiful”, and wipes away a tear. In my opinion, there’s two ways to interpret this reaction:

She truly thought the statue was ugly earlier, and needed some time to appreciate it, artist-to-artist

Or,

She was putting up a front earlier to avoid being perceived as “weak” by Kate

There’s certainly enough evidence for either conclusion, but I tend to lean towards the latter myself. This scene takes place about halfway through the first season, so it would make sense for a shift in how the audience perceives Constance’s characterization to occur at the midway point. We see her open up to her friends more in the last episode, but this moment sets the precedent for those bits of emotional honesty to occur. In fact, this scene also sets a nice precent for her solo mission in the next episode, where she once again proves herself to the society. However, this scene has something that her solo mission does not.

Shilo (by Neil Diamond)

The lyrics to this song are placed perfectly with each part of the scene, and I wouldn’t expect anything less. Let’s break it down a little bit:

Dreaming each dream on your own / When children play / Seems like you end up alone

Once again, this is the first scene where the audience has had a chance to see what Constance is like on her own. It highlights her sense of isolation from the rest of the team, and implies that this might not be as voluntary as she lets on. She even has to finish solving this puzzle alone, as the other society members seem to never truly consider her capabilities when deciding how to approach a problem (except Reynie on occasion)

So you turn to the only friend you can find / There in your mind

This lyric further displays Constance’s solitary nature, but also gives some subtle foreshadowing of her psychic powers

Got to go and I know that you’ll understand / I understand

She has come this close to solving the puzzle, and now effectively “understands” it. (I mean, just look at her face when the song says “I understand”) However, the song doesn’t stop here, as she continues to try and figure out how to activate the panel. So, she doesn’t understand as much as she thinks she does.

Overall, it’s a perfect song to drive this scene forward (and it’s very catchy, too).

TLDR;

This scene is emotionally impactful to me personally because I was able to make connections between this scene and my childhood. It is also emotionally impactful to a wider audience, as this is the first peek into Constance’s psyche. The music and environmental storytelling used to craft this moment is masterful. It fulfilled my desire for the show to make me feel nostalgic. Also, it’s a turning point for the show to start revealing more of Constance’s emotional vulnerability. (And it makes me tear up each time I watch it, so there.)

#mbs spoilers #the mysterious benedict society #mysterious benedict society #mbs #listen I’m sorry this is a stream of consciousness but this is the best I can do

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theradioghost · 3 years

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for no particular reason: opinions on Various Frankenstein Movies I Have Consumed

Hallmark Channel Miniseries (2004)

god i want to love this so much more than i do.

there’s so much to love. the sweet sweet face of henry clerval. that absolute baby of a creature. the fidelity to so many details that somehow just make the few-but-significant departures completely unbearable.

“frankenstein wants to bring back the dead” is for me without question the worst sin any adaptation can commit, but especially in one that is clearly otherwise working so hard to be faithful to the original. as i have said before: IF THIS BITCH KNEW HOW TO BRING BACK THE DEAD HE’D HAVE A LOT FUCKING FEWER PROBLEMS.

Also, don't even get me started on their portrayal of late-1700s graverobbing (the professor would not have been shocked! but also, Germany had laws that significantly reduced the need for body theft, so why does this act like he's studying in Britain? WRONG. oh fuck, i’ve gotten started)

i think i actually might never have finished watching this one? i don’t remember. i probably should just for the fact that it contains Clerval

Victor Frankenstein (2015)

Unquestionably the least faithful adaptation.

Unquestionably and by far THE GAYEST ADAPTATION.

This is not a story about scientific hubris and a sad monster, this is a story about Hot Frankenstein gazing lovingly into Hot Igor's eyes and gushing about how wonderful and brilliant he is, and then getting really pissy and jealous when he acquires a girlfriend.

I can almost forgive it for having the single worst creature I've ever been subjected to, and for once again committing the sin of Bringing Back The Dead. Also for having such a flat color scheme in such a weird movie that deserved the jewel tones of the bizarre melodrama that it is.

also, I kind of feel more willing to let this one Bring Back The Dead, because they went so hard on that particular theme? like, these are in no way those original characters from the book, and so it almost works to have given this bizarro frankenstein his own motivation.

a very bad movie objectively but you should watch it anyway

I, Frankenstein (2014)

... I do not hate this movie anywhere nearly as much as I should.

Neatly sidesteps the question of fidelity to the novel by not including any of the events of the novel. It's a refreshing change to have an adaptation truly focused on an articulate, self-aware creature

also I liked that the rank-and-file female soldiers among the gargoyle-people weren't all betitted in their gargoyle forms? If I remember correctly their leader does look very different from the rest, but for the most part all the gargoyles look the same.

It also has a truly, unbelievably bonkers plot? I think this is the rare situation where being such a fan of the source material has made me *more* willing to forgive its many, many flaws as an actual movie. I can really actually live with this one, somehow.

Definitely a So Bad It's Good gem with little hints of a neat idea buried within the weird and bad glory of it

Universal Frankenstein (1931)

I mean, what is there still to say about it?

No, it's not at all faithful to the original novel, but at this point that's almost not a question anymore

It gave us so much. The genius of Jack Pierce's makeup, book-accurate or not. Boris Karloff's star-making role. The iconic censor-terrifying blasphemy - It's alive! Now I know what it feels like to be God! The quintessential images of mad science that have haunted our cultural imagination ever since. James Whale's understanding - which All Us Gays know in our hearts is at least in part because he was one of us - that the creature is as much victim as villain, striking out only against a world that struck him first simply for being who he is. never forget that this movie was made by an openly gay man.

In that sense, I feel like it's ultimately faithful to the novel in the way that most matters? It knows that there is more than one monster on this screen, and it knows which one we should be on the side of when the credits roll.

WRT the sequels I would never neglect to mention the majesty of the Bride, but I also want to give a shout to poor, studio-abused Bela Lugosi, who was told he was playing the creature as blind in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and then blamed for the moaning arms-out cliche when all reference to blindness and all his lines of dialogue were cut from the movie.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)

shoutout to Hammer Films for setting apart their movies from Universal by really focusing on Frankenstein, not the creature

and damn, if Peter Cushing didn’t give us a hell of a villain protagonist though

and of course it's Hammer, so, boobs! Gore! Poor Christopher Lee in that makeup! But what we're really here for is the inevitable gravity that pulls a physically and mentally deteriorating Frankenstein back into this same mistake over and over for decades over the course of this series

I have never heard of Ralph Bates, I don't know who that is, don't call this number again

Ngl I actually prefer the Hammer Draculas and I definitely prefer Sir Christopher there, I know they cast him because he was extremely tall, but he's too dignified for this

There's something very satisfying, though, about the sheer variety of creatures that Hammer goes through set against Baron Frankenstein's complete inability to change or give up. Articulate? Monstrous? Two human souls in one body? Frankenstein himself? It's a wild ride! Every third character's name is Hans!

only watch these if you have a tolerance for Old Movies with Problems but if you delight in cheesy old horror the way I do then go for it

The Bride (1985)

this was the first frankenstein movie adaptation i ever saw and I don’t want to think about it

the creature is played by mr krabs and Sting is there

that’s all

#my posts

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hylaversicolor · 2 years

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i think it’s interesting that people who rightfully criticized the hobbit films for being overlong and full of tensionless action ignored or looked past these same problems in lotr. pj’s lotr films are faithful adaptations but they’re safe, you know? too safe, to the point of mediocrity in places. and i will concede they have some truly stellar moments and you can always feel the passion that went into these movies but the end result is always less than the sum of its parts to me.

i remember seeing people who made fan edits of the hobbit complaining about bilbo’s 14-minute prologue and how getting to see erebor and the arkenstone and smaug attacking came too soon. they argued that pj should have let the story unfold organically from bilbo’s house outwards. and i get that and i agree with it, but fellowship has this same exact problem and no one cares???? in the first ten minutes of fellowship jackson dumps all this isildur/sauron backstory on us in a fucking voiceover montage!!! like, this is bad storytelling, bad cinema!! it might as well have opened with peter jackson himself appearing on camera telling the audience to take notes. i get that jackson was going for grand scope and whatnot but he could NOT have shrunk the story more by showing us sauron SO early, and to that end, showing him as a guy in a suit of armor who throws people around. like, make me care!! this totally goes against the feeling you got in the book of gradual unease and the stability of things being eroded, the status quo turning on its head. the nazgul were so effective (and would have been even more effective without the prologue) because we just don’t know what the fuck they are until aragorn briefly explains it. the unknown is scarier!! and bleagh this resolutely sticking to the book plot i think diminishes the overall effect of the films. like when frodo gets to the dead marshes in tt he needs to know the story behind them, otherwise the corpses in the water are just spectacle. but we can’t slow down to explain this so we see them and move on and it never comes up again!! and then when frodo and sam get to osgiliath we have no idea why it’s important, we don’t learn that it was once the capital of gondor, it’s just a random ruined city. jackson renders so much from the books in these films but if you don’t know the story, if you don’t know why it matters, you just won’t care. it’s so frustrating!!

#txt #lotr #long post #i love these films i really do but NOT how i would have done them

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t-lostinworlds · 4 years

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The Devil All The Time: A Review That No One Asked For

Well, I don’t know why I’ve been putting this off but here I am 48 hours later. Though the fact that I’m still thinking about the movie two days later is proof how long it stays with you right after you watch it. By all means, I’m not an expert reviewer aha so this maybe all over the place but: It is a good movie. It wasn’t perfect of course, the flow could’ve been a tad bit better, and the narrator threw me off sometimes, a few missing bits in terms of the characters but it’s still good nonetheless. I do want to point out that the movie wasn’t as dark and brutal as how the book went. It wasn’t a graphic or gore as I’d expected it because some critics did overplay it. So, if you’ve read the book, the movie will come off as a much lighter tone. Also, if you watched GoT, then you’ll be fine with the gore. But with that said, there are still triggering scenes so people should still be mindful when watching. A couple of changes but that’s a given with every book adaptation but there were a few that I thought was better in the movie than in the book, which I will get more into in a sec because I’ll try and keep this other half spoiler free.

The visuals, the cinematography, it was beautiful. I loved how everything looked on screen, scenery, colors, lighting, the whole lot. The music and the little added touches of sound effects was just so spot on that you just feel more on edge as the movie goes, like little ticks here and there. Now, the cast, whew. Nobody fell short with their performance. Some might have smaller screen times than others but still, nobody was lackluster or pushed to the side and they gave their best with the material they were given. Although, I may be biased but from what I’ve been seeing around I think we can all agree that Tom Holland struck out the most (I’ll gush about him more under the cut aha).

Long babbling short, I loved it. Right after I finished watching, it truly did feel like I went running lol, like I got so into it that those last few moments (or every intense scene for that matter) that it had me at the edge of my seat. But I also wanted to watch it again soon after. It may not be for everyone’s taste, although I am interested to see what the people who haven’t read the book thought of it because I do see how it can come off confusing in some parts. I already knew what was going to happen and some background on why it happened so it was easy for me to fill in the missing pieces. But with that said, it’s still a good adaptation and it stayed as true as it can get to the books. 8.5/10 would recommend watching, with caution of course.

a more detailed (specific scenes, characters, actors performance, and more) rambling below the cut aka spoilers ahead!!

I’m going to start off with Willard Russell who was played so well by Bill Skarsgård. I haven’t seen anything else of his before but he was so good in this movie. His interaction with Haley Bennett's character Charlotte was different from the book but I'm not mad on how it played out in the movie either. It was a cute and a little awkward interaction which was all good. Charlotte is exactly how I thought of her, a sweet, beautiful, caring lady and Haley played her just as well. Especially with the scene where she and Arvin were singing together, that was just the sweetest thing.

But back to Willard (Bill) and all his interaction with little Arvin (who was also so great btw), it was just damn. For one, in the truck after he beat the living daylights out of those men, that switch of him being out of breath and angry and him teaching Arvin about those bullies and finding the right time and him saying, "there's a lot of no good sons of b*tches out there." to when Arvin asked him if it was more than a hundred and he chuckled as if he didn't almost just killed a man? And then suddenly he was back to this loving father who cares so much about his family and would anything to protect and defend them (sounds familiar right? Apple doesn't fall far from the tree.) Although I will say that Willard is a much horrible person in the book than he was in the film. The prayer log could've gotten more… bloody and gross as time passed by. And the thing with Jack Russell (Arvin's dog, who wasn't actually a jack russell but oh well), they changed it so that he was with them longer so it did have more weight if you put it that way since Arvin has grown to love Jack, so killing him off screen was still going to be heart breaking. But in the book, it was a stray dog that wandered into their place and Arvin fed him, named him but on the same day, as soon as Willard got home he shot the dog right in front of Arvin. Now that would've been much crueler and could've showed just how far gone Willard is with his whole "faith" and how desperate he was on saving his wife who he's so in love with but damn, the things love can make people do. Or, they could've added the part where Willard killed the lawyer and poured his blood on the prayer log because that for me was a turning point in the book where I went, Willard has lost his freakin mind with the sacrifices. They did show the lawyer in the movie that's why I was a bit confused when it didn't happen but you can't cram anymore into a 2-hour movie. To conclude, this movie made me want to watch more of Bill for sure, but I'm too scared to watch IT (im a coward) so looking forward to what he does in the future.

Next I want to talk about are Helen, Roy and Theodore. Mia Wasikowska was great. She had so little screen time but whenever you see her on screen she just embodies Helen so well. Helen didn't have much to do in the book either aside from the fact that she was supposed to marry Willard and then didn't because Willard went off with Charlotte and Helen went to marry Roy which was kind of the starting to point as to why everything in their life has gone to hell, and then be a sweet mother to Lenora. But besides that, Mia gave her best and served the character well in my opinion. Theodore on the other hand could've done so so much more. Given that he was the driving force that made Roy kill Helen. If ever I haven't read the book, it would’ve look rather random how suddenly he wanted to try resurrection. Roy and Theodore's relationship could've been explained more, specifically Theo's feelings because that was why he pushed Roy to do it. Now, Harry Melling as Roy Laferty was great. The scene with the spiders and then the emotions you see in his face and his eyes when he tried to resurrect Helen? Remarkable. The slow realization that it wasn't working, the shift on his face was so clear and that momene where it crosses his mind that he just killed his wife it was just, Dudley Dursley who? Though his death came earlier than I expected, and they changed quite a lot and it felt so random how he just left Theo in the car and went on a hitchhike when in the book, Theo died first that's why Roy decided to try and go back to his daughter. But his death scene was still intense, and the fact that his last word was Lenora? His daughter? Amazing.

So, now we see Carl and Sandy Henderson, who showed immediately how crazy they were when they killed Roy (who wasn't their first kill but). Both Riley Keough and Jason Clarke were fantastic, and they really did bring the uneasiness so well on screen. And I love how you can actually see how Sandy change from the first time we see her to the last, like it looked like Sandy was played by two different actresses so huge props to Riley for smashing that role from innocent sweet girl to this troubled serial killer. Although I wished their story was showed better, more so Carl than Sandy because out of the two, Carl was much, much sicker in the head than Sandy. He was the one who'd constantly look at those horrible photos and do…stuff, which was so sooo gross to read I feel sick just thinking about it. But Jason Clarke did a great job at portraying Carl's creepiness as much as he could, like I couldn't bear looking at him on screen without grimacing.

Lee Bodecker. Sebastian Stan did a great job a making him insufferable that's for sure. I always love how the moment Lee is on screen Seb is just gone. He just never failed to feel like this weird and corrupt cop or sheriff. Although I will say, his and Sandy's relationship could've been showed better because I have seen where people didn't realize they were siblings until the end. But I do like how you see that Lee doesn't really care that much for Sandy, I mean he does, but not as much. His mind has always been about being re-elected and having these stories about Sandy won't make him look good does it? Though his emotions in the end when he was in that car with Sandy was really spot on.

Emma and Earskell, I won't really dive into much because there's really isn't much to say than they were both great. They both made Arvin and Lenora feel like they do have a family and that they weren't alone, like they just came off as kind people on screen. But gosh Emma, that woman deserves a proper vacation for everything that she's went through. But Lenora, oh gosh, her story and how it ended was the most painful to read and watch. She was just a sweet innocent girl who got bullied and she deserved none of that. Eliza Scanlen was just wow. I loved her in Little Women, loved her even more on here as well. And her chemistry with Arvin (Tom) in the movie was just amazing, like they bounced of each other so well and you can see with just one look how much she admires Arvin. But the last scene where you can see her face, that split moment when she paused and then slowly smiled as she thought how her grandma won't be ashamed, and that she will take care of her baby and give it the life that it deserves but then she slipped and that made the scene even more heart wrenching. Let me tell, I screamed "Nooooo!" when I read it in the book and I screamed just as loud when I saw it on screen despite already knowing how it ends.

That f*cking rev. tergaryen what's his face. I couldn’t stand him in the book couldn’t stand him just as much in the movie which says a lot on how great of an actor Robert Pattison is. Each time he's on screen I emotionally and physically just can't stand him. Mind you I watched all his scenes with the Reaster girl and his wife with a proper scowl and kept looking away. But his scene with Lenora in the car I was peeking through my fingers because I can't sit and watch it fully because it was just so disgusting to watch. Robert Pattison played him so well that even his voice was just so creepy like dude, shut up. And when he was manipulating Lenora, rambling about his freakin delusions? Ugh I really wanted to punch the screen, big kudos to Rob for bringing that disgusting character to life. And well, I'll say he did get what he deserved in the end so.

Last but definitely not the least, Tom Holland as Arvin Russell. Gosh, where do I even start with this lad? This boy has range I can tell you that. I'm going to be talking so much about him so haha sorry but he was just amazing and I need to point out so many things. First scene was his birthday, and you can see how he seemed like just a normal, happy boy celebrating with the people the he loves but the moment Uncle Earskell handed the gun and mentioned that it was his father, his whole mood changes, his whole face fell and the look in Tom's EYES, his eyes does so much to portray his emotions and goodness he's so freakin amazing at switching from one emotion to another in so little time. To be honest, Arvin in the book is much more cold and harsh, even when it's towards Lenora and his Grandma. Hell, he makes sly digs at Lenora in the book which is more of a way to make her see how cruel the world is, sorta a tough love kinda of thing. He's just not that affectionate, with how he grew up, it's a given.

But Tom brought so much more depth to the character that even I didn't see as much while reading the book. Which is why people are so drawn to him, it makes him easier to sympathize and like in the movie, all because Tom added even more layers (i need my onion emoji dammit). I mean, Arvin is complex as is in the book, a lot colder for sure, but with how Tom portrayed him you just get to think so much more on what could possibly be going on in Arvin's head. You can just see all sorts of emotions the character goes through, from being rash, to angry, to hatred, to fear, to sadness, to vulnerability and these emotions happen so close to each other that the switch is just incredibly impressive. When he charged towards those bullies to protect Lenora? This is where you can see that when he's filled with rage, he sometimes doesn't think things through. It was three against one with guys much bigger than him, it was obvious he was never going to win but he still did so anyway because he loved Lenora, he'd do anything to protect and avenge her, why? It's what his father taught him. It's what he saw when he was a kid, that no matter if it’s a violent act, he'll do it for the people that he loves. Like i said in the beginning, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

There so much like father like son moments in this film, which didn't even come off forced because I've seen in an interview where Bill and Tom read their lines together despite not having a scene together and oh did it pay off because you can see a little bit of the Willard you see on the first bit of the movie in Arvin all throughout, which is again, a testament to how great these actors are. Also, Tom's scenes together with Eliza are just wow. It's incredible how much they contrast each other but still be connected in a way, like Lenora is this sweet innocent girl who's kind hearted and is willing to forgive her father for whatever he could've done while Arvin, gosh, every mention of his father his face always falls stoic and it's so amazing to see Tom play that emotion so well with so little movement like a clench of his jaw or his eyes. Their relationship was just so wholesome. Even with that scene in the meat shop where Arvin was teasing his grandma, it was such a sweet moment to see that side of him because in the book, the interaction was just plain he said, she said which I interpreted as being nothing more than a casual conversation but in the movie it was more light-hearted which is so interesting given the a few moments later, you see Arvin's rage again and he was already in fight mode when that preacher insulted Emma's cooking (which was a so not okay that freakin imbecile) which again, slowly opens the doors to how far Arvin will go for the sake of protecting and avenging the ones he love. Also, the fact that they changed who found Lenora's body to Arvin instead of Earskell was far better. My heart freakin broke for that boy when he was screaming as he tried to keep her up in hopes that he could still save her. Thomas Stanley Holland man, that scene was just wow, it was a lot to take in. But that change only added as to how he was going to handle the preacher later in the movie.

What did impress me the most was the quick switch Tom makes with his emotions. First off, that moment with those bullies. He was relentless with how he handled them, just full on anger and hatred like when he beat those boys best believe I kept flinching because it looked painful as hell. And then he says, "I'll kill you." (with that thunder sound which was a really nice touch), and this is where you just see how he's someone you shouldn't mess with who can potentially do so much more damage (which he does). But the moment he gets in his car and closes the door? You see nothing but a kid who's downright scared of what he just did, he knew it was somewhat wrong, like he couldn't actually believe he did that in the first place but as he'd said, he did it because had to and felt like it was the only way, which is again, a callback to what he saw with his father with them 'bullies,' it drilled on him how that's the only way. But my goodness the way his hand shook, his breathing, the fear in his eyes, and then when he wiped the blood on his hand then that flashback with Willard? Yes yes yes, another like father like son moment.

It's the same thing with the way he handled the preacher, it was much more different in the book but I liked this version better. There's just something poetic about it being in the church all while Arvin confessed the preacher's sins for him, it was just amazing writing. But the way his hands shook when he was standing the first time he enters? Like he could’ve done it right then and there but he can't because he's scared. I mean the way his voice was breaking with that sinner line (which was so funny how they made it seem so badass in the trailer) he was trying to get himself together, like the way he was breathing so shakily shows his nerves and his fear. But as he reiterated all the disgusting things the preacher did, you see that rage bubble inside him, you see him slowly grow more confident because his fear was now replaced by anger. And once that his rage was at full capacity, the moment they started talking about Lenora? (Tom and Rob's exchange was amazing btw) He was able to shoot him down with one hand, shaking gone all because he was angry. But as soon as he's dead and the anger subsides, the fear is so quick to consume him, you see it the moment he sits down. And again with his eyes you see it all in his eyes, just Tom Frickin Holland everybody. That exchange was easily the best one.

As for his interaction with Carl and Sandy, his expressions in the back seat as he slowly realizes what was going to happen to him, it was just amazing. This is where you see more of Arvin actually being smart, he's a bit rash and compulsive sure but he is definitely smart. But now, you don't see his anger because he doesn't know this people, the only thing he knows is that they were trying to kill him. So notice how he shot Carl with two hands this time? and how he was shaking exactly as he pulled the trigger? Same with Sandy? Compare that to how he handled the preacher. Also his fear when he thought he got shot? The utter panic was just, though he did puke in the book which would've showed just how much he didn't like what he just did and how he felt so wrong. Same with his interaction with Lee, he knows how asses his situation and damn, I don’t know if its sheer dumb luck or this boy just got incredible aim, I mean he's practiced in the books and he's gotten good but you don't see it in the movie though. But still the same, you see more of him being regretful which just shows how complex he is as a character. And Tom showed all these emotions so freakin well without saying much at all. You just see it, which shows just how talented he is.

Everything somewhat came full circle in the end, he buried Jack's bones which what he's been wanting ever since. And he also buried the gun, which was somewhat him saying how he's had somewhat a closure with his father and that he's putting it all in the pass. And then we end the movie with him trying not to fall asleep which honestly what it felt like after watching the movie. I needed a breather. That last shot was so calming though it does make you wonder where he goes on from here.

My goodness I could go on and on about Tom's performance and I definitely missed so much more but I feel like this is long enough lmao. Also feel like i’ve missed a few moments in the movie as well. Now I hope people will see what good of an actor he is and to show that he's more than just playing Peter Parker. Right, that's enough. I'm going to say how many words in total this was but, it's a lot.

And that is it for The Devil All the Time. A very good movie, would want to watch again but damn, I feel like I need a nap because what a movie indeed.

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years

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Michael in the Mainstream: Artemis Fowl

Since the early 2000s, Artemis Fowl has been languishing in development hell, and it really is a mystery as to why. The series has everything you could possibly want for a blockbuster young adult franchise: it’s a charming blend of science and fantasy with rich worldbuilding and mythology, it has enjoyable and even complex characters who go through great character arcs over the course of the series, it has an enjoyable major antagonist, an insufferable smug villain protagonist who goes through a stellar redemption arc over the course of the series, and tons of crazy heists that combine scheming and fairy magic. There was no reason this couldn’t have existed as a competitor to the Harry Potter series, but alas, it was not to be. The young adult fantasy franchise languished for decades in development hell, until finally Disney pulled it out and put Kenneth Branagh at the helm. Finally, we were going to get the Artemis Fowl adaptation we deserved!

Except we didn’t.

Artemis Fowl is legitimately one of the worst adaptations of any work of fiction ever. It has been held up alongside The Last Airbender and The Lightning Thief as part of the Unholy Trinity of terrible adaptations, and I’m not even going to try and pretend that this “Honor” isn’t well and truly earned. This film is an utterly abominable bastardization of the beloved franchise, to the point where this feels like an entirely different story that had familiar names slapped on it at the last second. If you want to know what horrific extents this film has butchered the story and characters, read onward, but there’s no way I’m going to pretend this film isn’t awful right off the bat.

There is literally nothing in this film that works. Nothing at all. Starting from the opening scene, the establishing shots, you can tell things are wrong – there are news people around Fowl Manor? Mulch is being interrogated? What is going on? The film from the word go is simply making one thing absolutely and abundantly clear: this is not the Artemis Fowl you know. The film goes out of its way to do the opposite of the franchise, merely using names and vague concepts in an attempt to sucker fans into watching it. Butler’s first name, an emotional reveal from the third book, is common knowledge; Opal Koboi, a cunning and threatening major villain who was the antagonist for almost every novel starting with the second, is here reduced to basically a personification of the voice on the phone from Scream; Root, once a short-tempered man who was hard on Holly as a method of tough love to push her to be the very best LEP had to offer to prove women belonged on the force, is here a woman who, while just as angry as ever, robs Holly of a major part of her arc and reduces her to plucky female sidekick. And even outside of that, as its own thing, the movie is just utterly incomprehensible. The story is rushed and confusing, with lots of exposition and action but with no context or cohesion. Things happen and things go from scene to scene, but none of it makes any sort of sense. A character will switch allegiances within a few minutes, characters will somehow find a way to survive deadly attacks offscreen… the worst offender is a character death they try to push off as emotional, despite there being no reason to care for this character, and when all hope seems lost, a deus ex machina saves the day! My wife, who is unfamiliar with the series, and I, a huge fan, both struggled to figure out what was going on at any given point; the movie is really that bad at communicating what is happening, which is even more baffling because the film is a pathetic hour and a half in length, a distressingly short amount of time to establish a new science-fantasy franchise of this scale.

The characters are almost all terrible. Artemis is the standout with how awful he is; no longer the cunning criminal masterminds of the book, Artemis here is more of a somewhat smug little brat who is overly emotional and, worst of all, NICE. He’s so nice in fact that by the end of the film he has managed to speedrun his character development and arcs with Mulch and Holly, who consider him their close friend and ally. Butler is pretty bad here as well, mostly because he is given almost nothing to do and is seemingly only there because he was in the book. In fact, his crowning moment – when he took on the troll – is instead given to Artemis and even Holly, with Butler ending up severely injured. It’s a bit nasty that they changed Butler to be black and then had his (white) master steal his greatest moment; it’s giving me flashbacks to Kazaam. Opal is hit pretty bad as well; being made the big bad of this loose adaptation of the first book’s plot – which is amusingly one of the few books she had absolutely no role in – wouldn’t be so rough if she was more of a presence and not just some vague, hooded figure who threatens Artemis over the phone and generally does nothing to warrant being an adaptation of the baddest bitch in the series. She’s rather ineffectual and they even try and give her a sort of sympathetic motivation, one where she resents humans for pushing her kind underground. It really is a disgusting waste of a character who could easily rival heavy hitters like Voldemort in the awesome and theatrically evil department.

Holly is almost okay, but her entire arc and a big chunk of her narrative purpose is robbed by making Commander Root a woman. Root, played by Judi Dench, is honestly one of the better characters since Dench has Root dropping lines like “Top o’ the morning to ya” with gravelly deadpan seriousness which makes the character unintentionally hilarious, but the cheap laughs don’t really make up for butchering the story of one of fiction’s finest ladies. As a side note, they have made Holly 100% white despite her skin being described as nut brown rather frequently in the book, and the now white Holly together with Artemis steal away Butler’s biggest moment. And that’s not even getting into how they neutered Juliet, who has also been race lifted but was turned into a child who barely appeared in the film. I’m not usually one to toss about racism accusations, but there’s a lot of red flags here that Branagh’s usual colorblind casting just doesn’t excuse.

The most consistently enjoyable performance is Josh Gad’s as Mulch. From the moment he was cast, I knew he’d do a good job and capture the spirit of the character, and he does! ...sort of. The decision to have Mulch be a giant dwarf and narrate the story in a crappy Batman impression while also violating literally the most important law of fairy culture (don’t tell the humans anything about us) by spilling the beans to M16 is unbearably stupid, and a lot of his jokes are just relentlessly unfunny. But I think that Gad does leak a bit of that Mulch charm at a few points, and it’s apparent he at least somewhat gets his character, which is not something that can be said for anyone else in this film. Sadly, much like his standout performance as Lefou in the live action Beauty and the Beast, he can’t possibly save the trainwreck of a film he’s in.

I guess I’m not entirely surprised by this film. I mean, a lot of quality young adult literature from the past two decades has been horrifically mangled in the wake of Harry Potter – Inkheart, The Golden Compass, The Lightning Thief, Ender’s Game, and Eragon – so this movie really isn’t an anomaly. But it is the culmination of a horrible trend. This is the zenith of horrible young adult adaptations, or perhaps I should say the nadir of adaptations as a whole? For all the flak I could give those other adaptations, on some fundamental level they still understood something about the source material. Ender’s Game still understood it could not erase the ending where children are revealed to be being conscripted to perform the ethnic cleansing of an alien race. Eragon couldn’t completely ruin Saphira, try as it might. The Lightning Thief… well, I mean, I guess the Medusa scene was mostly faithful. But Artemis Fowl? Artemis Fowl goes out of its way to be the opposite of its literary counterpart that there is no way to justify even saying it is based on the book by Eoin Colfer; it would be like having a movie about kids hanging out at the mall and doing mundane stuff, except they’re all named Jesus and Peter and Paul and then saying it’s based on the Bible. Just using names doesn’t mean anything, you actually have to use the themes and characterizations too, and this movie does none of that.

This movie is most comparable to The Emoji Movie. Neither of these works really deserve to be called a “Film” since they are basically whatever it is they’re trying so desperately to be stripped down to the bare essentials. The Emoji Movie is the most basic, by-the-numbers animated adventure film with a “be yourself” message you could ever hope to see, with a story so absolutely basic that just watching the trailer will allow you to predict the every motion of the plot. Artemis Fowl on the other hand is the most cliche-ridden fantasy epic franchise-starter you could imagine, and that’s if you’re able to penetrate the ridiculously dense and cluttered story and are able to make sense of what’s going on. I can think of absolutely no one this film could ever appeal to. There’s not a single redeeming thing about it. The movie is flashy, trashy junk that should never have been released, and Disney honestly did the right thing by releasing this on their streaming service because it would be outright disgusting to charge movie ticket prices for this tripe. The fact Disney has more faith in the eternally-delayed New Mutants theatrically speaks volumes about the quality of this film.

I can’t in good conscious say that this is the worst film of all time. F4ntastic is probably a much worse butchering of characters than this film; Disaster Movie is much more horrendously offensive and unfunny than this; hell, Chicken Little is probably a worse Disney movie because as awful as everyone in this film is, at least they aren’t Buck Cluck! But I don’t think there’s a single movie I hate more than this one. Lucy can finally move over and sleep easy knowing that the fact it’s not based on a pre-existing work has finally saved it from the #1 spot on my worst list; Artemis Fowl is now the reigning champ. Kenneth Branagh should be ashamed of himself for making and releasing this (and doubly ashamed for having the gall to unironically compare his slaughtering of Artemis Fowl’s character to Michael Corleone), Disney should be shamed for putting more money into this film than they did into BLM charities, and I hope that Eoin Colfer finds whatever he was paid worth it to see his greatest creation butchered and disrespected like this.

#Michael in the Mainstream #Review #movie review #Artemis Fowl #Kenneth Branagh #Eoin Colfer #fantasy film #fantasy #science-fantasy #Josh Gad #Judi Dench #Disney #Disney+#disney movie

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twistedtummies2 · 3 years

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Ele-May-ntary - Number 18

Welcome to Ele-May-ntary! All throughout the month of May, I’m counting down my Top 31 Favorite Portrayals of Sherlock Holmes in movies, television, radio, and video games! Last time, I discussed Christopher Plummer as Sherlock Holmes: one of the more prominent actors to tackle the role. Today, we’ll be talking about a somewhat lesser-known performer. Number 18 is…Ronald Howard.

No, not as in the guy who directed Jim Carrey’s Grinch. (Wouldn’t THAT be interesting…) Ronald Howard is an actor you probably know nothing about…which is fine, because beyond his performance as Sherlock Holmes, I don’t think I know much of anything about him, either. (Unless he’s been in some other shows/movies I’ve seen and just no recognized him in.) Howard played the character in the mid-1950s, in the first American television series based on the character and universe, simply titled “Sherlock Holmes.” The series wanted to present a take on the characters that was more faithful to Doyle’s work than the popular Basil Rathbone films of the late 30s and early-to-mid-40s…despite the fact that only four stories from the Conan Doyle canon were ever actually adapted even semi-faithfully out of almost 40 total episodes. Anyway, keeping this in mind, the first thing I want to say is that I admire the show’s decision to set things in period, during the Victorian era. This may not sound that strange at first, but prior to this, nearly every take on Holmes out there modernized things specifically for the sake of budgetary reasons: period pieces were often expensive, on many levels, so when a studio tackled Holmes and Watson, they usually had the pair solving capers in then-contemporary times. Despite having a shoestring budget, the 50s show bravely decided to bring Holmes back to his Victorian roots, a choice I greatly appreciate and respect. This creative decision is not the only one that I think is admirable: Howard’s portrayal of Holmes is equally delightful. Howard and the producers decided to portray a Holmes early on in his career; not so much a brooding, almost alien figure, but more a childish eccentric. Often distracted by his work, but not yet embittered by the ravages of time and great experience. He’s cocky, cool as a cucumber, dismissive, but also sincere and truly interested in seeking justice. He never lets much faze him, and more often than not, when he seems to be down and out, he’s already coming up with a strategy to get back on top. He’s the sort of Holmes who’ll blast bullet holes in his wall to celebrate the Queen’s birthday, but he’s also the sort of Holmes who will waive the fee for people who need help and can’t properly afford it. He’s the sort of Holmes who will become so excited when he comes across an escape artist cleverer than he is, that he’ll take the case just to figure out how the man keeps evading imprisonment…but he’s also the Holmes who takes things very seriously, and becomes darkly introspective, when going after a bizarre serial killer who leaves flowers at the scenes of his crimes. I also really love the relationship this Holmes has with both Watson and Lestrade. You really do feel the almost brotherly relationship he has with Watson, and the way they get along is really interesting. Howard Marion-Crawford’s Watson is arguably the first truly book-accurate take on the character ever put to the screen; while he can be very funny, he’s NOT a bungler nor a blowhard. He’ll get frustrated with Holmes, but he’ll also joke around with him; he’s highly protective of his detective associate, and admires him greatly, but when Holmes goes too far out of line, he’s quick to stamp his foot down. He’s even able to see past Holmes’ own facades at times, knowing when the master sleuth is lying or simply being evasive about matters. As for Lestrade, while he was often blustery and was NEVER right, and both Holmes and Watson frequently poked fun at him, he was not a clown. Holmes even admitted in one episode that he felt Lestrade would probably be able to solve a certain case on his own, and when Lestrade showed up with his tail between his legs in shame, he was sympathetic in how he helped the good inspector out. This is a very old but by no means dated interpretation. Admittedly, the other actors and performances are hit and miss, and the writing isn’t always top notch…and the fact the budget, again, wasn’t all that great does lead to some humorous moments of clear cheapness…but the way the main character and his closest allies are handled still manages to hold it above the water. This interpretation actually proved to be rather influential, as several other popular versions – most notably Disney’s “The Great Mouse Detective” – actually borrowed elements from the show, or used it to give them pointers along the way in their own renditions. A true “oldie but goldie,” both for Holmes and his world. The countdown continues tomorrow! Who will be next? Check in and find out!

#ele-may-ntary #top 31 sherlock holmes portrayals #sherlock holmes #1950s TV Series #ronald howard #not the grinch #number 18

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letterboxd · 3 years

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Exorcism.

Film-obsessive documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe tells Aaron Yap about watching The Exorcist for 30 days straight, mining William Friedkin’s personality for his absorbing new documentary, and the films that floor him.

“Sometimes you can be watching a romantic comedy but what you’re really craving is a film noir.” —Alexandre O. Philippe

William Friedkin loves to talk. A consummate storyteller off and on screen, the director is known for recounting wild tales of his storied life and career as the charismatic wunderkind who ascended to New Hollywood’s elite with 1971’s Oscar-showered cop procedural The French Connection. A couple of years later his reputation would grow two-fold, adapting a novel by William Peter Blatty called The Exorcist and unleashing what is still perhaps the most revered and discussed horror film of all time.

To this day, the film, which broke new ground for its grounded, rigorously methodical interrogation of demonic possession and faith-in-crisis, continues to terrify and haunt our imagination. But as Alexandre O. Philippe reveals in his Shudder documentary Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist, it’s in ways that are more intangible and unfathomable than we imagine.

From the William Friedkin papers of the Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. / Photo courtesy William Friedkin

Throughout the intimate one-on-one session, it’s clear that the 85-year-old’s gift of gab has not diminished. As ChainsawMasacre writes on Letterboxd, “his mind and memory is still like a steel trap”. Philippe, a Swiss-born cinephile-centric doco filmmaker who’s covered everything from zombie movies to George Lucas, captures Friedkin’s contagious ranconteuring in all its prickly, contradictory, exuberant bluster. It’s so absorbing that from the moment he opens his mouth, you’ll be hooked in and suddenly an hour has vanished without you even realizing.

It’s true that considerable swathes of Leap of Faith may feel like old news to Friedkin/Exorcist obsessives—anyone who’s listened to the DVD audio commentary, read The Friedkin Connection, or watched Francesco Zippel’s Friedkin Uncut will be familiar with some of these stories. But Philippe’s incisive, thoughtful, highly accessible approach, excavating deeper than anecdotal interest but eschewing academic stuffiness, makes the documentary as much of value to newcomers as to seasoned fans. “The intersection of influences between music, film, fine art and personal travesty made me admire Friedkin on a whole new level”, writes Databaseanimal.

How many times have you seen The Exorcist, and on average how often would you need to rewatch a film in prep? Alexandre O. Philippe: You have to watch a film over and over and over again. I can’t tell you generally how many times I’ve watched The Exorcist but I can tell you when I was preparing for my interviews with Bill, I watched it every day for 30 days straight. That’s part of the process.

Leap of Faith is a bit of a departure from your previous two deep-dives—Memory: The Origins of Alien and 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene—in that you’re only talking to one interviewee, and that interviewee happens to be William Friedkin. What was that experience like? It’s wonderful. It’s really hard to put into words how incredible it’s been to spend that amount of time with him. Getting my own personal masterclass with him is invaluable. There’s no film school in the world that can give you that experience. It’s been really something.

Did spending that extended time reveal something about Friedkin that you weren’t aware of prior to shooting? Oh sure, that’s the beauty of that extensive of an interview—six days—and multiple conversations in between. Without giving it away, in the final sequence when he’s talking about Kyoto Zen Gardens… this is the stuff you can only get from someone like Friedkin once the comfort level is there, once you’re in the groove of conversation. It’s an aspect of his personality we’ve never seen before.

We all know him as a storyteller and a showman but he’s probably been very guarded in the past. There’s a certain amount of vulnerability even when he talks about the climax of The Exorcist, and how much to this day he’s not sure he understands some of the choices he made shooting that scene. That’s a remarkable thing to say about one of the most iconic scenes in the history of movies.

William Friedkin in ‘Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist’. / Photo by Robert Muratore, courtesy Exhibit A Pictures

I could listen to him speak for hours. Did you challenge him at any point? I definitely pushed him as far as I could. The whole sequence around the climax of The Exorcist that I was just talking about. There’s only about three minutes of that in the film but we talked about that scene for an hour and a half. I kept pushing and pushing him because I didn’t understand where he was coming from. I feel as a film fan that I understand that scene. For me, Father Karras sacrifices himself. It’s an act of complete selflessness. But he kept going back to the idea of suicide and that suicide in the Catholic Church is a sin and how he didn’t understand it. And that’s why you see him a little on edge during that scene. It was very important to go there.

I love the obsessive detail that goes into your examination of the creative process. Was there any detail—something that is interesting in and of itself—that you left out? We had a really great conversation around Carlos Kleiber, one of the conductors he admires the most, who essentially taught him to direct in metaphors. It’s a fascinating conversation. We actually built a scene around that and it just didn’t work with the film. There’s a point in any film where it becomes autonomous and its own entity in a way and you have to listen and pay attention to what the film tells you it wants to be.

We also had a great conversation around his first documentary The People vs. Paul Crump, and the technique which he used of slapping him in his cell on death row, which is the same technique he used for Bill O’Malley in The Exorcist. I had a long conversation with [executive producer] Karyn Kusama about this and we felt it was a little too over-the-top to go there and it wasn’t necessary to take the film to that level so we eventually left it out.

Friedkin talks about The Brink’s Job at one point, which is great to hear as it’s probably my favorite underrated Friedkin film. What’s yours? [Laughs] If you’re talking underrated or one that’s not much talked about, for me it’s Bug. Bug is ummm… [pauses]

What can you say about Bug? I mean honestly, truly, have you ever seen performances that pushed to the very edge of what’s even reasonable to expect or see from actors? It’s mind-blowing stuff. How does he even get performances like these? I mean they are wonderful actors but Michael Shannon and Ashley Judd, like, really… Like, really? You know what I mean? That’s Billy.

To me, you’re talking about Billy when he was in his early 70s when he made that film, a filmmaker who’s still really interested in pushing the envelope and going as far as he possibly can. It’s absolutely remarkable and I wish we talked more about that film.

Tell us about one ‘holy grail’ film or filmmaker you’d like to cover. The one I really want most to make a film about, and I will, is Vertigo. To go back to Hitchcock. I definitely have a healthy obsession with that film—have had since I was a kid. I love melodrama, and it’s the greatest melodrama ever made. I can’t think of a better film for my money from anywhere. It’s a glorious, glorious piece of filmmaking, but it’s also a very complex, tortured, complicated film that alienates some people.

I was on TCM a couple years ago as Ben Mankiewicz’s co-host on “50 Years of Alfred Hitchcock”. We did 24 movies together and when it came to Vertigo we had a fun conversation because he’s not a fan. He’s basically like “what’s the big deal about that film?” That really fascinates me. That’s a really amazing thing and he’s not the only person I highly respect who said that to me. I’d love to not only do a deep dive into Vertigo but also what’s so polarizing about it. That’d be fun to do that.

In Leap of Faith, Friedkin talks a lot about non-horror-specific aspects, such as grace notes, and the mysterious, magical aspects of filmmaking that can’t be easily explained. What movies are you drawn to but can’t explain completely through the technique and science of filmmaking? Any great work of art, not just film, that has a lasting impact on us and on society, works in ways that are much more mysterious than not. You can explain away the many different tangible reasons why Psycho, Alien and The Exorcist continue to have an impact, and had a massive impact on audiences when they came out. But for every tangible reason or every fact that you can provide, there are a million mysteries as well.

I’m much more interested in the mysteries of the creative process than I’m interested in the behind-the-scenes anecdotes or little tidbits of movie history. Because you will never get to the bottom of it and that’s the real beauty of it. And the lesson to learn from that is there’s nothing to do beyond just being in awe of it.

Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe / Photo by Bas Bogaerts

What’s a documentary that uses the form in a way that’s inspiring to you, or one that made you want to pursue this form? I don’t watch a ton of documentaries. I don’t like the term ‘documentary’. With that asterisk out of the way, there are a number of documentaries I absolutely adore and filmmakers that are pushing the form that are remarkable. I think of Allan King, one of the great documentarians.

There is one that, formally speaking, absolutely blew me away and is very hard to watch. It’s called Caniba. It’s a documentary about this French-Japanese man who killed and ate one of his classmates. He did a whole comic book on it, and his brother is equally disturbed. It’s one of the few films, along with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, where I had to literally stop halfway through ’cos I just couldn’t handle it. The remarkable thing about this film is that the entire film is extreme close-ups. You’re watching basically his face and his brother’s face in extreme close-up the entire film and it makes you absolutely nauseous.

The formal choice that was made, in committing to that, it’s so much more horrendous and horrible than what’s on the periphery of the frame. You’re trapped in the geography of that face and you can’t get out. I’m not sure if ‘exciting’ is the best word I can use here, but to say this kind of approach excites me when I see a documentary filmmaker doing this, is accurate.

How do you spell that? I’m going to put it on my watchlist. C-A-N-I-B-A. Good luck watching it my friend [laughs]. Don’t eat while you’re watching it.

What films have you caught during the pandemic and completely loved, old or new? I watch almost exclusively the Criterion Channel. They’re the gold standard. I don’t even know where to begin. Recently I just watched the three Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter collaborations: The Servant, Accident and The Go-Between. I’ve always been a huge fan of Harold Pinter but what Joseph Losey has done with those three films is astonishing. The Go-Between, especially. Wow. That film just floored me.

They had a whole sidebar on Western noir films, and I discovered a bunch of incredible titles like Station West and Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum, which is an absolutely magnificent film. Some of the early Douglas Sirk movies. I can watch that stuff all day.

Oh there’s another one I would like to recommend as it is a criminally not just underrated, but completely under-the-radar film: Sun Don’t Shine.

Kate Lyn Sheil’s performance is amazing in it. Oh my god. Why didn’t she run away with the Screen Actors Guild Award, Oscars, Golden Globes? Like seriously. Some of the recent nominations Meryl Streep has been getting, like give me a break. It’s not even close. It’s not even in the same ballpark [laughs]. It’s really one of those rare performances that I think about, like Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher. Once in a generation you see something like this and you go “Holy cow, what a performance”. It does not exist on DVD or Blu-ray and it kills me. I want that film in my collection so badly.

Kate Lyn Sheil in Amy Seimetz’s ‘Sun Don’t Shine’ (2012).

Maybe this will be the thing that will get them to push it out on physical media. I’m trying, I’m working with them, and I’ve done some with them. I need to send them an email and say “Can you please do something about this?”.

What’s a film that you were cold on first viewing but has grown on you with repeat viewings? The first one that comes to mind is Donnie Darko. I really hated the film the first time around, and it’s weird because there was always this voice at the back of my head that kept saying “watch it again”. I did and it completely blew me away the second time around. Often I will give a film a second chance. Especially when I know the film is well-respected. There are films where you can intellectually understand why the film is respected, but you don’t connect with the film.

I’ll tell you one that I’m really looking forward to giving a second chance. Not because I hated it but it left me really underwhelmed. A film that everybody loves: Moonlight. I also do remember when I was watching it, actively thinking I was not in the right frame of mind for that film. Sometimes you just have to recognize that. Sometimes you can be watching a romantic comedy but what you’re really craving is a film noir. That’s really not going to work.

So we’ll see, we’ll talk about it after I’ve watched it a second time. And hopefully it will be a revelation. There’s nothing better for me than these moments when you watch something the second time that didn’t work and you go “Holy cow this is great”. That’s an awesome thing to experience.